When I went to Bellevue, Washington, to visit Bungies headquarters and a look at Bungies MarathonI remembered the first time when I played a PC copy halo as a teenager. Although I had previously registered hundreds of hours on Xbox, I was terrible with my mouse and keyboard until a patient spent hours to lead me to victory. I had another guide MarathonBut it was not a random username that was hundreds of or thousands of miles -it was Kevin Yanes, a former fate developer who is now the runner gameplay lead Marathon.
And it was in my victory alongside Yanes – and our later defeat – when I started to believe that MarathonBungie could actually pull off the three-goal by putting another genre into the masses.
The way Marathon Work Escape from Tarkov. But even if you are not, the game will still be largely familiar if you have played a Battle Royale game Fortnite or Apex legends. What does games play how Tarkov And now Marathon Apart from the Battle Royale genre, on which a large group of players are dropped onto a card on which they loot objects and try to survive, the prey can leave the match with them. The goal of Marathon It is not the last player in the lobby. It is to find cool shit (either hidden in a chest or stolen from other players) and then extract with the cool shit in tow.
Every game of Marathon Starts by choosing the runner you want to play. These runners are essentially heroes – everyone has a pronounced appearance, a few specific skills and a handful of passive effects. Then use your loadout by pulling objects from previous runs into your inventory, e.g. Or, if you are just starting and do not yet have an article or currency, you can start with a sponsored package, which contains free or cheap (in terms of credits that in the game currency) Loadout with low quality versions of everything you need.
If you are ready, group (or matchmake) with two other players and go on the map of your choice – of which there are several, each with different levels of difficulty and play caps. While Bungie told us that as a solo or duo player you can get out into a round, you will be a clear disadvantage.
Image: bungie
They load into a card with different number of opponents, whereby the number of card size depends. Dire Marsh, the card on which we played for most of my preview, can hold 18 players – six squads of three, including their own.
The goal is double. First, you would like to find the best kind of prey you can on the menu. You can earn prey as a reward by completing events, AI enemies (all are very dangerous and will easily kill them when they lose focus) and solve minor puzzles. Second, you will try to make progress in all contracts with the most important factions of the game. Although we couldn't interact as much with the contract and reputation metagame as I would have liked it, it showed promising – especially for players who don't just want to hunt other teams for sports.
If you are full and contracts are concluded, it is time to find a peel location. If you activate your extraction light fire, it shoots a huge ray “Please do not hurt me” to the sky, which notifies all other players that someone tries to flee with good things. If you survive until the peel fails, keep your prey and everything goes into your vault for the next time you want to use it. If you die in the game at any time, you will lose everything They had in their inventory and cannot get it back.
If that sounds hard, that's the way it is. It's a kind of point. And while there are some friendlier elements Marathon Compared to Tarkov And play like it – for example, you can repeat your allies unlimited – it is the hardcore and the most punishable game that bungie has ever made. But here is all the tension, and that led to some really adrenaline pumps during my sessions, a reaction that really surprised me.
Image: bungie
When I arrived in Bungie for the first time, I had accepted that Marathon Wouldn't be for me. I was a big Halo multiplayer type in my youth, I introduced hundreds of hours Pubgplayed a lot of apexAnd basically not yet depressed Determination Or its continuation since 2014. But with increasing age I am less inclined to deal with PvP, and for this reason the extraction genre never really attracted my attention. Although Bungie managed to play games that speak to me all my life, my story with the studio was not enough to outweigh my skepticism.
After the developers carried us out how Marathon Work, I was accompanied to the play area to get the game into my hands. The squads were prefabricated and I was brought to a group with another American journalist and another country that tried to communicate with us. And so our morning began to be destroyed. Whenever we came across other players, it did not go well for us, which admittedly felt like a real “accidental matchmaking” experience.
When I went to lunch for the day, I felt in conflict. On the one hand, I was worried that my PvP problems were well founded and that Marathon At some point I wouldn't be a lot of fun if I couldn't take on other squads reliably or confidently. On the other hand, the game was hellish. The slim, mechanical aesthetics is amazing, and the strong art direction has already risen a hype. As long as I was progressing my contracts and especially in the world of present MarathonI Was Have fun. My concern was what would happen if these contracts became more intense and if they did not interact with other players, it would no longer be an option.
Fortunately, things changed after lunch when Bungie decided to pull my team around. Suddenly we were accompanied by Kevin Yanes. Everything someone would say about Yanes was that he was Good at Marathon. This is an understatement, I soon learned. Yanes changed the game for me and our third squadmate, not because he could wear us while we learned – although that was certainly a part of it, I will not lie – but because he could teach us things that had played for hours to discover for hours.
When we came together in our first match, Yanes opened the card and fought two nearby locations. “Ok, we have a complex spawn,” he said, describing where we were on the menu. “There are two other troops that may Spawn here and here, so we have to be careful unless we want to pursue them immediately. “It was overwhelming and intoxicated. We have found all the cool stuff for you; Please come, take it! And we did it.
Image: bungie
When my knowledge grew, also my level of comfort. In a very short order, I asked myself from the question of Yanes issues to take over my newly discovered knowledge and insult to put it into practice. Still, I was worried Marathon Would not be fun without anyone like Jane as Squadmate. That the joy ogged with big shit every time, not in the game itself. But even if we have lost some of the extremely talented people Appreciation The players in the last game of day 2 I found that I still felt good in terms of my experience and my team.
It is a shame that not every player will have Yanes out there to teach them the game-so much his employees joke that they should send him with every copy of Marathon. But they will have me. And your favorite streamer. And guides (on igamesnews). And Tarkov Friends. And Halo player. And guardian of Destiny's Crucible.
Since haloBungie has not only rely on his qualified developers, but also to his community of players around the world to examine his games. For my friends, I will be Janes when it comes to Marathon – I will be the unknown online that I met when I played halo For the first time a day.
Marathon is difficult. It is punished and it is deliberately frustrating. It has low lows and heights that are designed. It is a difficult sale to the masses – the most difficult pitch bungie that has made so far. But what Bungie has always been good is to produce converts: players who see the vision are drawn in and hardly wait to share the game with their friends. I am an unlikely convert to MarathonThe vision, and I desperately left Bellevue to get back into the game – one of the best feelings you can have in something you play when you play on the clock.
There are a million factors that could fall Marathon: The overcrowded live service market, the monetization strategy of the game all, which Bungie has confirmed, is that it is not free to play freely and the state of the global economy. You would have to be a fool to look at every upcoming game in 2025 and to say: “This is a steady hit.” But what I can say without being a fool is that Marathon I really enjoyed PvP for the first time in almost a decade.
Others have been teaching me to play bungie games for 20 years, and even if I won't be as good as a teacher as Kevin Yanes, I look forward to paying it with my own friends Marathon Comes to PlayStation 5, Windows PC and Xbox Series X.
Disclosure: This article is based on one Marathon Preview event in Bungies headquarters in Bellevue, Washington, from April 2 to 4. Bungie made the trip and accommodations from igamesnews available for the event. You can find Additional information on the ethics policy of igamesnews here.
